


Skin Check

by LetGladnessDwell



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Adulthood, Alternate Universe, Angst and Feels, Doctor/Patient, Gen, Introspection, Touch-Starved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-15
Updated: 2020-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:28:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23157100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LetGladnessDwell/pseuds/LetGladnessDwell
Summary: A story about how small interactions can lead to not-so-small realizations. Or single Phil visits the dermatologist — because that’s what responsible adults do — and it upends all his plans.
Comments: 16
Kudos: 23





	Skin Check

**Author's Note:**

> Un-betaed so all mistakes are my own.
> 
> Standard RPF disclaimer: This is a fictional story about fictional characters.

When the doctor knocks and then enters the room, Phil is sat on the edge of the exam table still trying to figure out the best way to clutch the paper drape around his chest to keep as much of his body covered as possible. He knows that the doctor has probably seen thousands of imperfect bodies at this stage in her career. Still, he’s nervous and unsure how to have a conversation with a stranger, even a friendly-looking professional one, when he’s practically naked and his pale, thin legs are dangling off the table like a child’s.

But he’s not a child. He’s 23, a man with two university degrees and a paid internship at a video editing studio, and he’s been living in his own flat in Manchester now for months, paying his own bills and solving his own problems. A proper adult. Well, he did lock himself out of his apartment three times the first month and once — ok, twice — he overdrafted his bank account because he hadn't bothered to do the math before ordering late-night pizza delivery several nights in a row.

But he’s really trying to do things on his own, to do things _right,_ though so far his ideas about the right way to do things just look like a to-list he crosses off each day. He wakes up on time, he makes his bed, he goes to work, he takes out the trash. He hasn’t made any real friends yet, though all his co-workers are helpful if often stressed and distracted. He’s trying really hard, too, to be professional at work and to restrain his impulse to make weird puns. Most days he barely talks to anyone, and then he goes home and plays video games or watches hours of TV until he feels like he’s floating in other worlds, completely detached from his own reality.

So far, being an adult feels more like hiding.

Sometimes he thinks idly about trying to date again. Phil hasn't been on a date since the few awkward, superficial dates he'd been on in college that led to nothing but a handful of one-night stands; no one called back again. All dating had done was make him aware of how odd he is, how he didn’t feel like a first, or even a second or third choice, for the guys he met. He figures dating is something he can wait to focus on once he figures out how to look and act more like the type of person a smart, kind, ambitious guy would want to date. He thinks he might have to wait a long time.

Lately, every morning he wakes up and feels the same hollow emptiness in his chest — a sense that he’s forgotten something important, that he’s missing some elemental information that every other adult just knows — and he finds himself repeating a mantra over and over before he is able to get out of bed: _Everything’s fine, everything’s ok, this is what normal life is like for everyone, just keep going._

His mom still calls him every day after dinner, and she often frets out loud that her love of taking care of her family will mean that he won’t know how to do basic things, like sew a button or boil an egg or schedule his annual eye exam. She feels guilty, and her guilt makes him feel anxious that everyone can see that he’s just acting the part of an adult and that they are just counting the days until he will be booed off the stage.

One night months ago his mom had tapped two freckles near his wrist and said, "We have a history of skin cancer in the family. You should probably get these looked at one day by a dermatologist.” His heart had skipped in alarm, and he instantly added the task to the long undifferentiated list in his mind of things he should already have known to do, and that’s why Phil had made this appointment to get his skin checked. That’s what a responsible adult would do, right?

But right now he’s feeling like a hypochondriac idiot, wearing nothing but his underwear and a thin crinkly paper sheet wrapped around his torso in a chilly doctor’s office on a Tuesday morning. He feels too tall, too pale, too skinny, too ridiculous, too young. He has no idea what he’s doing.

The doctor looks young herself, maybe in her early thirties — he can’t believe she’s a doctor, much less that there are people near his age doing spectacular things like becoming doctors — petite and brunette and pretty in her green scrubs, and with flawless skin. She’s busy pumping antibacterial gel into her hands.

“So I’m just going to do a quick visual check of all your moles and freckles and we’ll have you out of here in no time,” she says, smiling kindly at Phil, and then she rubs her hands briskly together. “Sorry if my hands are cold,” she says, looking at him expectantly. “Let’s start with your left arm.”

He obediently holds out his arm and she uses one hand to take hold of his wrist and pull his arm toward her. Her hands _are_ cold, and he jerks back in surprise, but she keeps her grasp firm and so he takes a moment to loosen the resistance in his body so that she can position him the way she needs. With her other hand she places two fingers just below his shoulder and lightly traces down his bicep, across his elbow, and down his forearm, following the path of her fingers with her eyes. She rotates his arm slightly and repeats the same quick skim along the length of the inside of his arm. Then she cradles his hand in both of her own and examines the palm of his hand and then the back of it, fanning her thumbs out across his skin before scooping her fingers under his own so that she can spread them out to examine his fingernails and the skin between each finger.

“You do have some moles and freckles and you’re very fair-skinned,” she says, glancing up at him. “You need to have these checked every year and remember to use sun cream.”

Phil nods but feels like he’s fallen into some sort of trance. The moment the doctor touched him, all his anxiety seemed to vanish. Her cool fingers barely skimmed his arm, and it was utterly impersonal and nonsexual, yet he felt instantly _soothed_ and like all his senses had clamored awake in his body. He feels like all that exists is this quiet small room and the expanse of his skin, which suddenly feels alert and endless.

He feels his eyes flutter half-closed as she continues on to his other arm. For the next few minutes her fingers travel lightly across his skin, searching for moles or suspect textures. While he sits on the exam table, she pushes aside the paper drape to run her fingers down his thighs, his shins, and around the bones of his ankles, which he’s never thought much about before but that now feel both delicate and strong. Like with his arms, she pulls on each leg until he extends it and gently rotates each foot to examine the arch, the toes, the sole.

She pauses at a few of the larger moles to trace a circle around them and tells him which ones he needs to keep an eye on.

The doctor asks him to lie back on the table. As she pushes aside the paper drape to run her fingers lightly across his clavicle and a few sections of his chest and stomach that must have moles on them, he wonders at the fact that he feels no awkwardness or shame. Even when she lightly pulls back the elastic of his underwear at his waist and groin to quickly look at the skin underneath, he only feels a relaxed sense of being completely cared for.

She asks him to stand and takes hold of his elbow with surprising strength to help him sit up and then to move off the table. The tiles of the floor are bracingly cold beneath his feet.

He can feel her getting on her tiptoes so she can look at the back of his neck and then she pushes the paper drape away and touches a few spots on his shoulder blades and lower back before briefly lifting the elastic of his underwear again to check the skin hidden there. The air is cool against his body as she shifts behind him. Gracefully, she crouches beside his hip — he’s amazed that he is unfazed that a stranger is basically face-level with his ass — and touches the back of his thighs, his calves, and the ticklish tendons above his heels. It feels like his body is made of curves and angles and a thousand nerve endings.

Then she’s back in front of him, smiling. “Almost done,” she says. “Go ahead and sit back down and tilt your head toward me.”

He does as he is told and bends his head to rest the entire weight of it in her palms as she sifts through his hair to look at the pale skin of his scalp. He’s aware of each bump on his head as her fingers sweep aside sections of his hair. She gently bends the shell of each ear to check behind it and then lifts his head back up.

“Close your eyes,” she says, and then her fingers brush across his brows and his eyelids and down the sides of his face. He breathes in and feels the vulnerable skin around his eyes and the sharp lift of his own cheekbones. Finally, the doctor gently pulls up along his lips to check the skin inside, and he feels the pliability and mobility of his own mouth in a way he hasn’t known since he was probably a child.

“Everything looks good,” she tells him, and he opens his eyes. She’s looking at him calmly. “It’s really smart to start getting these exams early, especially if you have a family history,” she says, and her smile is kind and neutral. “I’ll leave some paperwork for you up at the front desk, but otherwise we’ll see you next year.”

He nods, and then she’s gone. The exam has taken probably five minutes, but it still feels like he is emerging from a long, timeless moment of suspension as he dresses and puts his shoes back on. In minutes he’s back out on the quiet mid-morning pavement, blinking at the mundane morning around him and feeling tall and strong and at home in his body.

It’s only as he starts walking back to his flat that the serene peace he’s been enveloped in begins to fade, and to his confusion what replaces it is tears.

The doctor had not hesitated to touch him. She hadn’t seemed to think his body was strange or that he was odd or weird. She had attended to him, borne witness, to his body. It wasn’t sexual, and what he felt wasn’t attraction — it was attention. It had been deeply pleasurable to have another person really look at him and to be touched. It reminds him of a time years ago when he had visited a friend’s church during Lent. They were having a foot-washing rite, and it had been an unexpected balm to place his feet in someone else’s hands for a gentle bathing. He wasn’t a believer, but it felt holy.

And what he understands as he hurries along the streets — with his head down to hide his tears and with the familiar tension in his body inching his shoulders up toward his ears, a returning estrangement — is that what he felt in the doctor’s office was acceptance. And that as soon as he left the office, what came roaring back in was a keen loneliness that he hadn’t even known was there.

He knows the meaning of the word _bereft,_ but now he knows that bereft is what he’s been experiencing all these mornings when he wakes up feeling hollow and like he’s missing something. He thought the feeling had been about his elusive quest to be an adult, but now he thinks it might be himself that he’s been missing all along.

He makes it back to his apartment with tears drying on his face, and sits down on his couch, pressing a cushion hard against his belly. He needs to be at work in an hour. He has things to cross off his to-do list. He needs to march along on this path he has set himself because eventually it’s going to lead to a place where his real life starts, where he is an adult that people respect and admire.

But right now what he wants more than knowing how to keep a budget, or cook an edible meal, or write an informative email, or figure out preventative health care, is for someone to touch him. He desires the world to see him as a competent adult, but he hungers for a man to hold his hand, trail fingers against the small of his back, press a palm to his chest.

He takes in a deep breath, imagining all his neatly plotted-out priorities rearranging themselves. Finding a friend, hopefully a boyfriend, had been at the bottom. Now he sees it in his mind’s eye at the top, glowing urgently.

He grabs his laptop off the coffee table and surfs to the last dating site he used, puzzling over the password before he is able to log into his dormant account.

Phil feels his shoulders unwind as he reads over his old profile, already editing it in his mind. Sitting here he feels more like himself than he has in months, his body a familiar country again.

Maybe he’s not an adult quite yet, and it will take him time to figure adulthood out. But none of that feels as important as it has the past few months. He’s just a person in search of someone else to feel alive with. Everything else can wait.

He looks down at his hands resting on the laptop. He takes one hand and drags his fingers across the back of the other, out until the tips of his fingers are templed together. His skin is soft and awake to sensation.

He begins to type.

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr reblog link](https://letgladnessdwell.tumblr.com/post/612669923620257792/skin-check)


End file.
